Multi-Site Collaboration

With design innovation increasingly being driven by suppliers, product engineering is becoming a more collaborative and cross-discipline effort.

Coordinating engineering activities across a global supply chain is a daunting task as pressure increases to meet more complex design requirements. Ongoing engineering changes – especially where multiple configurations are involved – make it difficult to keep bills of materials (BOMs) and other product data accurate and synchronized across the enterprise and the product life cycle.

Industrial product / equipment manufacturers and their suppliers are turning to Dassault Systèmes (DS)' solutions to handle both engineering and the associated coordination tasks. These tasks begin with project specifications and extend through to initial production planning. DS' solution for Multi-Discipline Product Engineering is designed to help industrial equipment companies eliminate process and data communication barriers that exist between mechanical, systems and software engineering disciplines within the enterprise and the supply-chain. This establishes a virtual product developmentplatform that help address the “design anywhere, build anywhere” business challenges.

DS' configuration management capability, developed through intense research and development activities in various complex manufacturing industries, enables Industrial Equipment companies to easily manage alternate designs or reuse designs from previous projects. Coupled with workflow and shared catalogs, changes can be rapidly communicated to related product development stakeholders.

We offer customers various options to conduct global engineering collaboration: using single or distributed repositories, in real-time or asynchronously. And as in any heterogeneous organization, there is usually a need to accommodate multiple CAx systems. Multi-CAx support is built into our solutions so that teams can freely review and exchange data while tracking changes and configurations across multiple CAx systems. With more and more component designs now provided by suppliers, we provide collaboration tools for OEMs and suppliers to work concurrently throughout the development cycle. For increased business agility, major changes can even be made late in the process without compromising manufacturability and production schedules.